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I guess with my last post I felt this need to elaborate on this topic.


What is your opinions of war and the nature of Humanity.

Personaly I have a very barbaric view, I believe man is just a big old animal with the ability to create bigger weapons. We all know that not all animals kill for just food... Murder does happen in the animal kingdom (someone here has to have exact animals etc, Im a little rushed for that research). I think war is very natural. How about you?

oh yeah and neccisary.

Fish?
Intrapersonnal conflict is natural, war is not.
No, it is not necessary.

Take second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is always increasing. Organizing an army goes against this principle, therefore not natural

Having just taken a course on Physical Anthropology, I'm not inclined to agree with you that humans are basically club-wielding cave men at heart.

While humans are mammals, it is fallacious to compare us to other mammals like lions, because we are different in very fundamental ways. You have to look at modern hunter-gatherer societies, the fossil record of early man and our ape friends to gain an understanding of our nature.

The image of the cave man was first perpetuated in the 19th century when Darwin first wrote the Descent of Man and the first cartoon of a sloping-forehead, hunched-over, club-wielding, dragging-women-by-the-hair cave man was circulated. This was the first image of the "missing link" - in response to Darwin and a rejection of the idea that humans are related to apes. The average Victorian thought apes were disgusting animals and were horrified by the thought.

Around that time, only one fossil of early man had been discovered, Pithecanthropus (by Dubois in 1891), and it was only a skull cap. Darwin and his contemporaries really had no idea what ancient man would look like or how he would behave.

We do know from the fossil record that early humans and neanderthals showed a great deal of compassion for each other. The best example of this is "Nandy", found in a neanderthal grave in Iraq. The skeleton revealed that "Nandy" was blind in one eye, had a withered right side, and his right arm had been amputated with considerable skill. Clearly, he could not have survived on his own in the harsh Ice Age environment, but he lived till the age of 40, and was buried in a grave with flowers, food and belongings.

To date, there is nothing in the fossil record of homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis or homo sapiens to indicate that they engaged in warfare. There are records to show that some practiced cannibalism - but such practices are not necessarily indicative of an inherently violent nature, but rather in a belief in sympathetic magic and an afterlife. Humans are social animals, like our relatives, the apes, and depended on each other for survival in more difficult conditions. Early homo owned no land or property, so a war would result in much loss, but no appreciable gain. I am not ruling warfare out altogether, but I'm pointing out that the past 100 years or so of discoveries have found no evidence for it.

War, then, appears to be an invention of more modern peoples - and first occurs with regularity as humans begin to farm and own property.

Most animals, including apes, are territorial to some extent. I'd say there's not really much difference in that basic element of any given animals makeup to see much difference in the way a lion or a gorrilla will defend what he considers his territory. It a basic survival trigger, as each wants to ensure their own wellbeing by securing a fertile peice of land that is capable of sustaining the animals need or guarranteeing the dominant males ability to reproduce by driving off any other male that seems like a threat to his own role of dominance. I wouldn't call it war though, but I do believ that the concept f war is rooted in this type of behaviour.

I'd be inclined to believe that earliest man was no different in this regard than any other creature. I don't think modern man is any different either. Regardless of however caring a species may be to members of it's own clan pride, or troop, or whatever you want to call it, they all show the ability to be hostile to any animal of the same species when it appears their territorry is being threatened.

War, then, appears to be an invention of more modern peoples - and first occurs with regularity as humans begin to farm and own property.

I think this is the key mark in the begginning of what most consider warefare. Once humans started settling and farming their own lands, the structure of the basic social structure grew in accordance. I don't think the structure changed all that much, I just think the numbers of people who identified with each other grew as settled people began to mark off territories that supported a much larger population than a nomadic way of life could ever make possible. As a result, the territorial conflicts that may have already existed on a smaller scale between smaller groups began to expand as the size of the groups grew. The resulting conflicts would have been more violent and prolonged, and war would have come into existance as we recognize it now.

I think we still handle things on that same level in a lot of ways. Diplomacy is the most desirable process for resolving conflicts, but I see diplomacy as basically the equivelent to the postureing and intimidation behaviour that usually goes first an an attempt to bypass actualy combat. Much the same way an animal can eliminate a threat to it's territory by seeming powerful or puffing itself up without ever actually engagin in any type of conflict. A lot of times it works, but sometimes, some animals just don't get the message. I think Diplomacy works, but still, sometimes, the person who is showing aggressive tendancies will not be detered by anything other than direct conflict.

Still, I don't see war as inevitable in all cases. Many disputes are resovled through negotiations, and most people are intelligent enough to see that war solves nothing that simple comprimise can achieve without the mass death and destruction. The only problem is, all it ever takes is a single individual in power to simply refuse to negotiate, and no amount of talking from any amount of people will be able to sway him from his chosen course.

In this case, I'd say war is inevitable until every single government in the world is composed of civil, moral individuals who are sincerely seeking the best results for their people and who have no personal ambitions of pwoer or wealth at the expense of others.

Just my own 2 cents worth. And I probably overcharged you by at least a penny

In this case, I'd say war is inevitable until every single government in the world is composed of civil, moral individuals who are sincerely seeking the best results for their people and who have no personal ambitions of pwoer or wealth at the expense of others.

Great post BS...You covered most of my own thoughts and explained them better than I could have, so I will just add the question, do you think that the above will ever actually happen ?

Elaboration...

By saying war is inevitable I did not mean in all cases, I believe diplomacy is a beautiful thing.

My main point must be resaid. I once saw a documentary about (i think chimpanzee's, probably wrong) these chipanzee's that murdered another chimpanzee. Waited till one got alone from his pack and the other pack basically jumped him... to weaken the ranks so the other pack would flee the area.

War in the sense it is today is different completly from my interpetations of "war" back in the day. I guess by war i meant natural instinct to protect to degree's of killing. Not nessicarly clan vs clan but more of a man killing man. Just in today's standards with such a populated and ruled world War in the sights of mass graves is more of what I speak of.


I agree that it is not mans course to always be combative but I believe that the beliefe in a higher being, the ideal's of some cultures etc are just man trying to make themselves more important. Hence were just animal's, really smart ones indeed. Yet our desire will always root back to hunt and gather, and protect.


Then again Im a computer tech and no freakin physcoligist (or really good speller). Or historian etc... Perhaps I should stick to random spam about naked women and beer?

Originally posted by Scayde
Great post BS...You covered most of my own thoughts and explained them better than I could have, so I will just add the question, do you think that the above will ever actually happen ?

Only when they let me and you RULE THE WORLD.

oops...maybe revealing a leetle too much ambition there

Good response, BS...
The point I want to make again is that if someone says "Human nature is thus and thus...", I feel that the statement has to be true for all humans throughout history and in all parts of the world. Hunter-gatherers (which 90% of all humans that ever existed for the past 130,000 years were) just do not have warfare. I don't think we have a "war" gene, in other words. I don't know, maybe what's not so obvious is that I really believe in the plasticity of human beings - No other animal is capable of creating new social systems as we have, and of passing on not only the parents personal knowledge, but the knowledge of the entire culture, and the world for that matter. We are really quite extraordinary. We are not dumb beasts at the mercy of our genes - that's just an excuse to rationalize bad behavior.

That's not to say that we do not have similar needs to express dominance as apes do on a personal level (ooh, that sounds funny, hehe)...but I think that warfare is entirely different - it involves massive strategic planning, and is usually done not to defend territory, but to acquire more, often more than what is required by the group. This, in no way, resembles the territorial behavior of animals.

Originally posted by VoodooDali
Only when they let me and you RULE THE WORLD.

oops...maybe revealing a leetle too much ambition there

Last nigth SYM..tomorrow the world !!!

Originally posted by VoodooDali


Good response, BS...
The point I want to make again is that if someone says "Human nature is thus and thus...", I feel that the statement has to be true for all humans throughout history and in all parts of the world. Hunter-gatherers (which 90% of all humans that ever existed for the past 130,000 years were) just do not have warfare. I don't think we have a "war" gene, in other words. I don't know, maybe what's not so obvious is that I really believe in the plasticity of human beings - No other animal is capable of creating new social systems as we have, and of passing on not only the parents personal knowledge, but the knowledge of the entire culture, and the world for that matter. We are really quite extraordinary. We are not dumb beasts at the mercy of our genes - that's just an excuse to rationalize bad behavior.

That's not to say that we do not have similar needs to express dominance as apes do on a personal level (ooh, that sounds funny, hehe)...but I think that warfare is entirely different - it involves massive strategic planning, and is usually done not to defend territory, but to acquire more, often more than what is required by the group. This, in no way, resembles the territorial behavior of animals.

While I understand what you are saying here Voo, I am not sure I agree totally...I look to the North American Native peoples as an example...Thos people who were agrarian and settled in fertile and hospitable climes oft had to defend their homes against the incursions of the nomadice tribes and neighboring clans...Not necessarily to gain 'more' land, but to gain better rescources.

I also look to the Vikings and Norse marauders who pressed into Western Europe at the onset of the little iceage..This was to secure airable land to sustain their people, and unlike the images fo the Barbarians we are taught about in history, these people only commited outright warfair where their incursions were resisted..In many areas they assimilated the locals and blended their culture whith the one already established...but still..they were fierce in battle, as formidable as any of their day.

Rather speaking of the war raids of the Comanche, the Incursions of the Vikings, or the Oil Grabs of Iraq...I think man has shown a stron history of 'taking' what they need from those who have it, and having to defend what they have from those who want it. I do not think this is a modern development...but more as BS said..the tendency to secure, prototect and defend the best possible territory for your family/tribe/community/etc.

That's not to say that we do not have similar needs to express dominance as apes do on a personal level (ooh, that sounds funny, hehe)...but I think that warfare is entirely different - it involves massive strategic planning, and is usually done not to defend territory, but to acquire more, often more than what is required by the group. This, in no way, resembles the territorial behavior of animals.

I understand what you're saying. I think the idea of territory has been expanded a bit by things like modern technology and the evolution of human settlements into complex nations. Nobody for the most part plants and grow crops anymore, a small percentage of the population does that. I think that economic wellbeing has taken precedence over the basic needs of food, land, etc. In today's world, power is often measured by wealth, and the ability to ensure survival for a nation is dependant on the nation being on somewhat of a level econimic playing feild. Either way, I think the basic needs are still there, I just think that some of those needs have changed and as a result, the dynamics of what we condiser to be essential to survival have changed from the simple to the complex.

What you said about war not being done to defend territory but to aquire more is true from the aggressors standpoint. That's what I meant about some people being immoral and more concerned about personal power than with the good of the people they represent. I think that can be altered in cases, but I don't think we will ever get to the point where no one anywhere isn't more concerned with themselves than others. There are always going to be some individuals who simply want what they want and have no qualms about taking it. As a result, the people they try to take from defend what they have, IMO rightly so.

In todays world, it often doesn't take an entire group to be make the decision to sggresively expand, it just takes a handfull of individuals with the power to make it happen. If we can ever guarranttee such people won't hold power, then we can effectively eliminate warfare. I just don't see how we can ever get to that point. As a whole, humans seem to be pretty sensible, but too many times the masses don't have that much effect on the outcome of things.

Simply put, I think you're right, humans are extremly capable of rising above this kinds of things, but I still think some humans are pretty much dumb beasts and quite simply could care less about anything but their own personal ambitions and comfort.

Man, you're making me remember ALL my cultural anthro

Good point again BS.

@Scayde: Yes, but you're speaking of more modern people...

I think you are confusing nomadic peoples with hunter-gatherers. Whereas hunter-gathers have been around since nearly the beginning of homo sapiens, nomadic people are fairly modern, arising about 5000- years ago, concurrent with agriculture. Some of them (like the Sioux), followed large herds of animals, such as the buffalo, moving from winter pasture to summer pasture. Others lived nomadically, but herded their animals - like the Bedouin. All are known for warfare - due to conflicts between needs for large chunks of land for the herds and large chunks of land for farmers. In contrast, hunter-gatherers are nomadic, but they do not follow any particular animal, and they never herd. They are opportunistic hunters, catching whatever they happen upon.

The hunter-gatherer societies that exist today are:
Australia's Aborigines
Africa's Pygmies and Kalahari Bushpeople
North America's Inuit
Borneo's Punan

I can't remember any other groups - but I'm sure there are a few more.

None of the above groups have leaders, a hierarchy, property or warfare. And we know from the fossil record of early humans that their lifestyle was the same type based on the tools that they used.

The main conflict they run into is hunting on other group's territory. When this occurs, they resolve it with "reciprocity" - the other group can hunt something on their territory and they call it even. These groups are quite small, 20-30 people including children, so in most environments, there is more than enough food to go round for groups with overlapping territories.

I certainly agree that war is a more modern invention to solving problems however, I don't believe that the solution is moral people heading each government. The human's "moral sense" is what seperates them from the animals(well that and thumbs)but, this moral sense is what leads people to war. Because each culture, religion, government etc. each has their own ideas of "good" and "evil" we see conflicts like that in Iraq when it is said that regardless of rather there was iminent threat, what we did was "right". Not agreed with by all, or many for that matter, but still said by our supposed god-loving and moral president. So morality certainly only mucks up the situation more. Can the problem of war ever be fixed, probably not. Should we ever stop trying, nope. Should the computer techs like random thug stop spamming my email?!!!? Hopefully more possible than war.

I thought this writer more eloquenly conveyed what I am trying to..so I will use his words...

NONZERO THE LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY By ROBERT WRIGHT




Chapter Five

WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

If we think how many things besides frontiers of states the wars of history have decided, we must feel some respectful awe, in spite of all the horrors. Our actual civilization, good and bad alike, has had past wars for its determining condition.
--William James



Ah, Tahiti. The lush island whose carefree natives the painter Paul Gauguin used as icons of primitive bliss. The serene culture which Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered evidence that humans had been "noble savages," peaceful and benign, before their corruption by civilization. Unfortunately, as the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley has noted, Rousseau relied for this conclusion on reports of Tahiti that omitted relevant parts of its history. For example: the custom in which a victorious warrior would "pound his vanquished foe's corpse flat with his heavy war club, cut a slit through the well-crushed victim, and don him as a trophy poncho."

Time and again there have been reports of a truly peaceful primitive people. Almost always, the reports have not worn well. Remember the "gentle Tasaday," the isolated band of hunter-gatherers discovered in the Philippines in the early 1970s--the people who had no word for "war"? Their authenticity fell into doubt along with the credibility of their discoverer, Manuel Elizalde. As the New York Times would later note, "It did not help when members of a neighboring tribe said Mr. Elizalde had paid them to take off their clothes and pose as Tasadays for visiting journalists."

To be sure, there are hunter-gatherer societies that don't exhibit the elaborately organized violence denoted by the term "war." But often what turns out to be lacking is the organization, not the violence. The warless !Kung San were billed in the title of one book as The Harmless People, yet during the 1950s and 1960s, their homicide rate was between 20 and 80 times as high as that found in industrialized nations. Eskimos, to judge by popular accounts, are all cuddliness and generosity. Yet early this century, after westerners first made contact with a fifteen-family Eskimo village, they found that every adult male had been involved in a homicide.

One reason the !Kung and most Eskimo haven't waged war is their habitat. With population sparse, friction is low. But when densely settled along fertile ground, hunter-gatherers have warred lavishly. The Ainu of Japan built hilltop fortresses and, when raiding a neighboring village, wore leather armor and carried hardwood clubs. The main purpose of the raids—to kill men, steal women, and settle grievances, real or imagined—is a time-honored goal of primitive warfare. Even today it is part of life among the Yanomamo of South America.

The behavior of observed Stone Age peoples is hardly the only evidence that the Stone Age was a bloody time. In a cave in Germany, clusters of skulls more than 5,000 years old were found arrayed, as one observer put it, "like eggs in a basket." Most of the thirty-four victims had been knocked in the head with stone axes before decapitation.

Anyone hoping that cultural evolution always translates into moral improvement will be disappointed to hear that such evidence of violent death is especially common among remains of the more complex hunter-gatherer societies. And in the yet-more-complex agrarian societies on the ethnographic record, things are similarly grim. In south Asia, a young Naga warrior was not considered marriageable until he had brought home a scalp or a skull. In Borneo, a Dayak hero returning from war would be seated in a place of honor and surrounded by singing women, with the head of one his victims placed nearby on a decorative brass tray. The, warriors of Fiji gave their favorite weapons terms of endearment; one war club was called "Damaging beyond hope," and a spear was dubbed "The priest is too late."

All of this forces us to confront the fact that, as Keeley has put it, "what transpired before the evolution of civilized states was often unpleasantly bellicose." Human violence has been around a long time, and often it has been not man against man, but group against group. Ever since the early stages of cultural evolution—the era of hunter-gatherer societies—that evolution has been shaped by armed conflict.

This would seem to throw a wrench into the analytical works. So far this book has mainly stressed the forces of human cooperation, the win-win situations. The thesis has been that the direction of history results largely from the playing of non-zero-sum games. But, presumably, once someone has decided that he wants to use your corpse as a poncho, the two of you are playing a zero-sum-game; his gain is your loss. So too with warring villages. When men from one village raid the other, kill the men and abduct the women, the air is rife with zero-sumness. And so on, up the ladder of cultural evolution: whether the contestants are villages, city-states, whatever—war is hardly nonzero-sumness incarnate.

Still, war isn't nonstop zero-sumness, either. One big reason is that, even as war is inserting zero-sum dynamics between two groups, within the groups things are quite different. If your village is beset by axe-wielding men bent on slaughter, your relations with fellow villagers can pivot quickly toward the non-zero-sum; acting in concert you may fend off the assault, but divided you will likely fall.

Much the same interdependence exists among the axe-wielding slaughterers; in unison lies their best hope for victory. So, whatever side you're on, you and your fellow villagers are to some extent in the same boat; your fate is partly shared. That, actually, is a good rough-and-ready index of non-zero-sumness: the extent to which fates are shared. War, by making fates more shared, by manufacturing nonzero-sumness, accelerates the evolution of culture toward deeper and vaster social complexity."

This was a constant refrain of one early cultural evolutionist, the sociologist Herbert Spencer. He overdid it ("Only by imperative need for combination in war were primitive men led into cooperation"), but he was on to something.

Consider again the Northwest Coast Indians. We've already seen how their evolving technology of sustenance raised social complexity. Division of labor and capital investment grew, and leadership emerged in the form of the "Big Man," who handled the logistics and helped keep social life in harmony. But all of this heartwarming cooperation to harvest nature's bounty was not the only social cement, nor the only cause for the Big Man's authority…

[SNIP]

An excerpt from Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, By Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. http://www.nonzero.org

Originally posted by Scayde
Voo...I remember reading about the remains of a man found in North America that was presumed to be 9,300 years old..I believe it was Kennewick Man ....this man had a spear head imbedded in his pelvis, evidence of deep lacerations over the ribs, and various other evidences fo violence...now I understand that these could have been hunting accidents, or personal conflicts..but they also could have been result of battle...How can anyone say with certainty?

I remember hearing about that - and coincidentally, today scientists won the right to conduct more tests on the remains. Here's what the scientists who were able to look at the skeleton described what they found:

Chatters said the bones "tell you a detailed story of his life."

The skeleton belongs to a wandering hunter and gatherer. His bones show little signs of arthritis, meaning he rarely carried heavy weights in his life of 40 to 50 years. His teeth are good, showing a diet of soft foods with a lot of meat.

Years before his death, a 2-inch-long stone projectile slammed into his hip and stayed there.

This was no mere thrusting wound but came from something flying into him at a high velocity, possibly propelled by a throwing stick, Chatters said.

Also, some years before he died, the man's chest was crushed. And he had to cope with a withered left arm.

"This guy is a heroic guy, unbelievably tenacious in life," Chatters said.

The skull's condition indicates the man likely died of an infection, possibly from his old wounds, Chatters said.

Anyway, I believe it's far more likely that the spear wound was indeed a hunting accident. They used projectiles in a thrower (an atlatl), not very accurate type of weapon, and hunted in groups. Hunting was very dangerous for early humans, death from animal attacks and hunting accidents were quite common.


Some unfortunate things with this great find - the bones were moved around a lot in the dispute, and improperly handled by various custodians - so all the DNA in the remains was contaminated and is useless. That's a shame. I'm not sure, but I think that the site where it was found was also disturbed - another very unfortunate thing, since a taphonomist will not be able to go in and gather as much information as before.


Regarding the article - I looked at his site - interesting to apply game theory to social science, and I'm intrigued. But I have a real problem with the way he is trying to lay out early human history.
First, he gives an example of a hoax. A warless tribe who are not really hunter-gatherers, just posed as them. I think he is trying to put forth a logical fallacy that if this tribe was bogus, then all anthropologists are lying.
Next, he admits that the bushpeople and inuit have no warfare, but goes on to mention a murder rate. The higher murder rate is indeed there, and related to the pressures of living in a small group. (Makes you wonder how a space station would fare). But murder and warfare are not the same thing at all. He then says that they have no warfare because of the habitat, and goes on to make a big goof.
His last example are the Ainu and Yanomamo. The Ainu and Yanomamo are not hunter-gatherers. They are what are called "horticultural" people. Horticulturalists are the stepping stone between hunter-gatherer societies and agrarianism. Horticulturalists still gather some food, but also have small gardens that they farm, and the men still hunt. They are semi-nomadic, and move from one camp to another every 3-4 months. They are very warlike - they are the headhunters, cannibals, and so forth that we conjure up when we think of primitive man. What they have that hunter-gatherers do not - is property. Also, as people settle down, the population increases - so one theory says that warfare is necessary to cull the population.

The jury is still out on the origins of warfare. I tend to take a more ecomically-deterministic approach, rather than a genetic one. I tend to align with Marvin Harris, the economic anthropologist, who says that all human behavior has an economic reason behind it.

Ya, I know you weren't saying that...I think that there is that inference when anyone conjures up the club-wielding ape man kinda thing.

I guess it really offends me - not because I deny that we are irrational and behave selfishly or violently at times - but because it seems both like an excuse for past bad behavior and a kind of apathy towards the future. I had a real hard time in a genetics class I took because one of the textbooks was by E. O. Wilson, who posits that every single human act/trait is genetically determined. He has some annoyingly damned good arguments for that, too...but I just can't accept the whole package.

I highly recommend a book by Marvin Harris called: Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches. Besides being fascinating - it's a lot of fun to read.

Originally posted by VoodooDali
Ya, I know you weren't saying that...I think that there is that inference when anyone conjures up the club-wielding ape man kinda thing.

I guess it really offends me - not because I deny that we are irrational and behave selfishly or violently at times - but because it seems both like an excuse for past bad behavior and a kind of apathy towards the future. I had a real hard time in a genetics class I took because one of the textbooks was by E. O. Wilson, who posits that every single human act/trait is genetically determined. He has some annoyingly damned good arguments for that, too...but I just can't accept the whole package.

I highly recommend a book by Marvin Harris called: Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches. Besides being fascinating - it's a lot of fun to read.

The title alone makes it sound as though it would be..I just might pick a copy up ..I would probably like to read them both...I can understand your offence of you perceive it as an excuse or feta comple...I do not think it is beyond our control...we have the wonderful gift of self determination..and that means that eliminating war is a possibility for humanity...I simply meant to state that IMO, it is, and has been a condition of our existance thus far...not to imply it is an inevitability that it reamain so..only a fact of our past and present.
When I say it is 'natural' ...it is not meant to say we can not rise above our nature..and if that were to actually ever happen, I believe we would in a relatively short time evolve beyond those instincts of conquor and defend..but it will have to begin as a massive conserted effort and conscious decision on the part of humanity as a whole to accomplish that.

Or at least that is my perception.